


come away with me

by rjosettes



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Aging, F/M, Future Fic, Hale family History, Post-Canon, Pre-Relationship, Slow Burn, World Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-13
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2019-10-27 07:24:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17762384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rjosettes/pseuds/rjosettes
Summary: Not every thread they’ve followed has led them into places like this, suited for nights out under the stars. Derek’s almost thankful for it, at this point. The both of them are familiar with cities, though neither of them has had the heart to try New York again, and there are a surprising amount of nearly-true urban legends around the world. Hurrying through crosswalks and grabbing street food keeps them busy in the downtime outside of research and wandering into places they probably shouldn’t be. Hiking trips unravel into long conversations, dragging old memories into the light, things Derek mostly wants to forget. Even when they trail off, there’s a lingering intimacy that he’s not sure what to do with. They know each other too well now.Kira and Derek travel the world together fifteen years after their first meeting. She drags him into a forest in Oregon to investigate a ghost story, or perhaps the ghost of a story.





	come away with me

“Are you coming or not?” Kira calls out, the deep purple of the last dregs of sunset falling over her. In this lighting, she doesn’t look a day older than she had when they met. The only thing missing is that uncertainty in every line of her body, in the set of her teeth splitting her bottom lip. Fifteen years have erased the doubt from her, and now that she’s in control, she’s always barreling headlong into something. “Well?”

Derek sighs and slings his pack higher onto his shoulder. “Under protest.” She waits for him until he tops the hill, looking out over acres of the same rolling landscape. He can just barely spot the small cemetery they’re heading toward through the cover of trees and brush. “We’re really going all the way out there tonight?” He’s exaggerating the distance, but considering the trip is pointless, he’s decided he’s allowed to complain.

“What’s the matter? Are you scared?”

“Of a ghost? No. There are no ghosts. Maybe of being bored to death.”

She’s smiling at him even as she’s rolling her eyes and it makes him think of the trip here, amiably arguing about the detour. Mason had taken Kira’s side when they’d dropped in on him with a late wedding present, and even his husband, fully human, had heard of the place. For Derek, that had been the problem. Anywhere getting constant visits from humans for decades had nothing to offer them.

“You’ll survive, old man,” she teases, shoulder bumping gently into his side. “It’s nine miles in, nine miles out. And you can always sleep out here in your fur coat if you’re too lazy to go back to camp.”

His mouth is half-open to insist that was one time, but he thinks better of it. That night in Greece has haunted both of them a little since, more than any other trip - ‘investigation’, if Kira has her way - that they’ve made in the last fourteen months. The less they dwell on their failures, the brighter this whole endeavor starts to look. Bit by bit, they’re gaining their own knowledge of people like them, untainted by the cruel eye of hunters exploiting weaknesses. Already they have more information than the bestiary on a dozen things, including the godforsaken lamia that ruined the tail end of a perfectly nice trip to Greece full of authentic food and sunshine. At the very least, this pet project of Kira’s is safe. A morbid little camping trip.

They walk along for a mile or two in comfortable silence, the sounds of the night softly filling the lull in conversation. The overgrowth here softens their footsteps, and already a mile out from the mostly empty campsite, there are no other human noises to drown out the world around them. Passing through a patch of firs, Derek can point out a tree vole nest, silently catching Kira’s attention when he spots the evidence on the ground below. Their eyes adjust quickly to the sliver of moonlight in the sky, and Kira navigates with the small device loaned out to them when they’d signed in. The cemetery is a popular site to visit, for obvious reasons.

Not every thread they’ve followed has led them into places like this, suited for nights out under the stars. Derek’s almost thankful for it, at this point. The both of them are familiar with cities, though neither of them has had the heart to try New York again, and there are a surprising amount of nearly-true urban legends around the world. Hurrying through crosswalks and grabbing street food keeps them busy in the downtime outside of research and wandering into places they probably shouldn’t be. Hiking trips unravel into long conversations, dragging old memories into the light, things Derek mostly wants to forget. Even when they trail off, there’s a lingering intimacy that he’s not sure what to do with. They know each other too well now.

“So you really think there’s something out here?” he asks her, when they’re much closer to the cemetery, wrought iron gates stark among the greenery. “Other than college kids scaring each other.”

Kira shrugs without turning to look back at him. “The screaming could be a mountain lion,” she allows, and Derek quirks a smile he’s glad she doesn’t see. “But put together with the ‘ghost’ sightings, I don’t think we can rule out a banshee. It’s not like we even know how long they live naturally, with what happened to Lydia’s grandma and her and Meredith being so young. There’s nothing in the bestiary because the hunters don’t care about a bunch of screaming women unless they’re getting in the way, and it’s not like we got a lot of information out of…well.” He doesn’t have to see her face to know she’s blushing, the way she always has when she gets on a roll.

“Out of Jennifer,” he finishes. “Julia. You don’t have to pretend it didn’t happen, you know. It’s been a long time.”

“Uh-huh. And that’s why you talk about me and Scott so much.”

He has no defense for that. If it were anyone but Kira, he’d think it was meant to be an insult. Both of them are in touch with Scott, of course, but he’s never thought it was his place to ask about when Kira came home. There are bits and pieces of stories, the burnt sugar smell of that feeling you get thinking of how things might have been, but he doesn’t have the whole picture from either of them. He’s not sure he wants it, if Kira isn’t willing to offer it on her own. Both of them have histories. Someday, Kira will have more years of loss and longing than Derek has lived. If Scott is a tender subject, he won’t dig his fingers into the bruise on purpose.

“Banshees age,” he says instead. “Lydia already has a cabinet full of high-end cold cream. Lorraine got old.”

“But she didn’t die on her own. Not everyone looks young forever just because they’re going to live that long. Satomi’s been old as long as my mom has known her.” She does look back at him this time, braid whipping around and eyebrows lifted. “Are you going to live that long?”

This conversation follows him around, especially now that he’s starting to find more than just the subtle suggestion of silver in his beard. For his own part, he’s mostly watching Peter - not a normal case by any means, but at least something he can measure by. “I’m not an alpha. I’ve never met a beta as old as Satomi, but I also grew up in Argent territory.”

“So you’re just going to be…waiting?”

“No. I’m going to be living.” He tries to parse the way her expression shifts, a flicker of sadness too deep to belong to someone her age that disappears into a look of approval. “If I don’t get myself killed, you’ll be able to mark it down. How long nature took to run its course.”

“Documenting isn’t my part of this job,” she reminds him, smiling. “Mister history major.”

By the time he’s done defending finishing a degree that he’ll never use for a real career, the air between them is a little clearer, less fraught. On the other hand, when he finally registers his surroundings, he can see the jagged lines of headstones southeast of them, growing smaller as they trek around a small copse of firs toward the thicker forest ahead.

“GPS isn’t broken,” Kira corrects before he can open his mouth. “We’ll circle back around to the graves. I wanted to check out something that isn’t plastered all over the website.” She doesn’t stumble even as they start to encounter briars and thick brush, so far from the clumsy way she’d made her way through the woods in Germany on their first official research excursion. Years of uninterrupted sand had spoiled her, but the turned ankles are behind her now, leaving her as sure-footed as she may ever be outside of direct battle.

Even his eyes don’t notice the remains of what was once a clearing before they’re at the edge of it, barely illuminated by the waxing crescent moon directly overhead. It’s a good forty or fifty yards across, a yawning gap punctuated by small trees, shorter and not as sturdy as the ones they’ve passed through. The edges are still too clean for it to have been natural, even with the work the land has down to reclaim it. “I think we’re about sixty years late to see the house,” he jokes.

“We’re not here for the house,” Kira answers easily, pointing across to two logs laid over one another into a sloppy point like an arrow. She grabs his hand, pulling at him with surprising strength as she follows, only now giving off that aura of excitement she gets when they’re on the verge of something. He can still see a faint orange glow around her when things are falling into place, settling into the picture she’s been building from the outside in. “We’re here for the tree. It was here before the house.”

It’s huge. Not nemeton huge, an ancient giant, but thick and towering over the others like a guardian. There’s nothing else special about it at first glance, no nests or hollows, the kind of thing he’d usually be the one to notice. The warm pull of Kira’s hand curled into his tugs him the last few steps around, over gnarled roots. “Here,” she breathes out, the aura around her seeming to vibrate with pleasure.

The gouge isn’t as deep as it once might have been. The edges are fading into the texture of the bark, blending into the tree the way the clearing is slowly becoming just another patch of the forest. But he’d recognize it anywhere in the world, and without thought he drags a finger through the groove of each spiral, rough texture pleasant to the touch - something rugged and alive, weathered but strong. “How?” he asks, foregoing the smalltalk of it all, the obvious.

“Malia,” she explains, her smile growing. “She may have had help, but. She wanted to know more about this part of her that wasn’t just…Peter. And she found this. The triskelion, and-” She does a half-twist, pointing over their joined hands back into the clearing. “What’s left of what used to be a root cellar. When the house was here. Before…before your family moved further south.”

He’d never bothered to ask about what came before Beacon Hills. When he was young it was all there had been and, so he thought, all there ever would be. Something about it had felt like it belonged to them, always had. He knows now, in the long absence of it, that the feeling had only been that of home. Of course there had been somewhere before him, before his mother or her uncle, before even Peter would’ve bothered poking into. “There’s no way this can still be here.”

“Malia said there was no scent left here, but that someone might have come before her. Marked it deeper, made sure it stayed just a little longer. She said she would’ve too, but-”

Derek shakes his head, dismissing it out of hand. “It doesn’t mean anything to her. Her family is with Scott now, her pack.” He traces the two rings against the back of her hand with a fingertip, feels the tiny shiver that runs through her. “If anyone’s going to make sure it stays, it has to be me.”

Kira hesitates, glancing at him for approval before she reaches up to touch it as well, pensive. “I wanted you to have the choice. It doesn’t have to mean anything. You don’t see me moving back to Japan. But…you could. This could be here, for a while longer.”

She lets his hand go reluctantly when he pull, holding back the shift until he’s clear of her soft skin. His claws don’t run deep enough on the first pass, or the second. She watches patiently as he digs his own history into the wood, whatever legacy he has or will have, his mother’s memory. By the time he’s finished, it almost looks brand new, an old thing remade in its own image, stronger. He remembers a time when he would have carved it deep into his own skin if he could, and when he burned it there instead, something to make the dark ink stay to remind him.

“We can touch it up,” she tells him, after they’ve examined the half-caves in shell of a cellar and the rest of the trees, searching for signs of life or death - both, really. They come together in pairs, always, eventually. “In a while. Twenty years, maybe thirty.” It’s too casual to comfortably question, and he wonders when she became as sly as the fox inside her. “It’ll last for now.”

“What about the banshee?” he asks, when she gently leads him back the way they came, past the cemetery, slow and steady toward the camp waiting for them, fire and something to soften the firmness of the ground.

She laughs at him, eyes bright, and digs her elbow into his side for good measure. “It’s a ghost story, Derek,” she reminds him. “There are no ghosts. Only us.”


End file.
